and MacAllister formed one group, who were soon deep in conversation. The tea-buyer took advantage of their preoccupation to address his neighbour across the table:

"So you are one of those missionaries."

"I am."

"Been gettin' a pretty fine collection of souls saved." "I never saved a soul. Never expect to."

The mate chuckled to himself. But the point was lost on the tea-buyer. He thought that he had scored.

"Glad to see that you have come round to my point of view," he said; "and that there is one missionary honest enough to acknowledge it."

"And what is your point of view?"

66

My point of view is that the red-skins and the black-skins and the brown-skins and the yaller-skins ain't got any souls, any more than a dog has."

"I do not know of any reason why the colour of a man's skin should affect his possession of a soul." MacKay spoke very quietly. The tea-buyer began

to bluster.

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Reason or no reason, no man is going to make me believe that any of the niggers or Chinees or any of the rest of them have souls. Christian or no Christian, a nigger is a nigger, a Chinee is a Chinee, a Dago is a Dago, and a Sheeny is a Sheeny from first to last. All the missionary talk and missionary moneygetting is nothing but damned graft, and the missionaries know it. Boy! One piecee whiskey-soda! Chopchop!"

"All lite! Have got." And the "boy," a Chinese waiter perhaps sixty or seventy years old, quickly and noiselessly brought the bottles.

"I suppose you have had abundance of opportu

nity to see and judge for yourself before you came to those conclusions, Mr. Clark," said MacKay.

There was that in his tone which would have made most men careful in their reply. But Clark was too self-confident to be wary, and repeated whiskeys and sodas had made him still less cautious.

"You may bet your bottom dollar I have," he replied. "I have known niggers and Dagos since I was knee-high to a grasshopper; and I have spent every season on the China Coast for the last five or six years. Oh, yes! I know what I'm talking about. I know them from the ground up."

"Doubtless you have visited many of the churches and chapels at the different ports where you have done business, and have for yourself seen the natives at worship."

"Me visit their churches! Not on your life! What do you take me for? I take no stock in any of their joss pidgin. I'd sooner go to a native temple than to a native church. But I've never been in either."

"Then I am afraid that I must assist your memory, Mr. Clark. You were in a native church."

"Me? Never!"

"If I am not mistaken, Mr. Clark, you were a passenger on the American bark Betsy, when she was wrecked on South Point, just outside of Saw Bay, a year ago last November."

"I was.

But I don't see what that has to do with the subject we were discussing."

The Betsy's boats were all smashed as soon as they touched water." MacKay was speaking in the dead level tones of suppressed emotion. But there was something so penetrating in his voice that the conversation at the other end of the table ceased, and

all were listening. "The Pe-po-hoan or Malay natives there went out through the surf in their fishing-boats and took every man off safely."

"Yes," replied Clark uneasily, "that's all right enough. But I reckon we could have made the shore ourselves."

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They took you to their village, called Lamhong-o: they opened their church: the preacher gave up his own house to you: they made beds for you there and fed you."

"Damned poor accommodation, and damned poor grub! Boy! One piecee whiskey! Be quick about it!"

"All lite! No wanchee soda? My can catchee." "No! Damn the soda!"

"All lite! All lite! Dammee soda!

"I shall not say anything, Mr. Clark, of the return those white men with souls made to those brown men without souls who saved them. But I shall tell you what would have happened if the missionaries had not gone to Lam-hong-o; if there had not been a chapel there; if those brown-skins had not been Christians. Your ship would have been pillaged. Your heads would have been cut off. Your carcasses would have been fed to the sharks. But they were Christians. So they saved you. They fed you. They clothed you. They sent you home with all your belongings that they were able to save from the sea."

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Right you are, MacKay!" exclaimed Captain Whiteley, bringing his fist down on the table with a thump which threatened to throw on the floor the few dishes which the motion of the ship had not already dashed out of the retaining frames. "Right you are! Nearly thirty years ago I was on the Teucer, Captain

Gibson, as senior apprentice with rank of fourth mate. We were bound from Liverpool to Shanghai, but ran on the rocks a little farther down the East Coast than the Betsy did. There were thirty-one of us all told. We got ashore without the loss of a man. But when those devils of natives were done with us, there were only three of us left alive-the carpenter, an A.B., and myself. And we wished that we were dead. We would have been dead, too, before long. But after being worked as slaves for nine months, a Chinaman, who had been with the missionaries on the mainland, bought us from the Malays, and rowed us out to the first foreign ship he saw, the old Spindrift. She took us to Shanghai.”

As the captain finished speaking MacKay rose and left the table. As was his wont, he had eaten sparingly and quickly. MacAllister was pressing Captain Whiteley for more details of his captivity among the head-hunters. McLeod was on the point of going out to his watch.

"That was score one on you, Clark," he said to his neighbour. "It doesn't pay to get too fresh even with a parson.

"I don't see that it's any of your pidgin to stick up for those fakirs," retorted the tea-buyer angrily.

"And I don't make it my pidgin," replied McLeod, "but it wasn't up to you to butt in on a man like MacKay the way you did. He gave you what you deserved."

"He needn't have flared up so and brought in all those mock-heroics about what those niggers of his did. I was only jollying him. He made things a great deal worse than they were.'

"He didn't make things half as bad as they were,

Clark. What about the way the native preacher's daughter was used by the men to whom the preacher gave up his house and his church? Those brownskins may have no souls. But MacKay believes they have. To my thinking they have a good deal more soul than the white-skins who did what was done there. You fellows went the limit. I wonder that MacKay let you off so easy."

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Oh! Say!-Damn it, McLeod, that's going too far. I'll not stand for that.-Say!-Here!-McLeod! Wait and we'll break a bottle of champagne. -Here!-Boy! One piecee champagne!"

"No, thank you, Clark! It's my watch."

At the door the chief officer paused and called back: "Say, Doc, when you are done feeding that big body of yours, come up on the bridge."

“All right, Mac. I'll be with you.”